Bad Idea Book

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Yifan Wu

Good Art is Making Mistakes.

image harvest

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paper engineering/ papercut rhino / Lasercut letterpress

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publishing / matchbox book cover design sewing / embroidery art market

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typography

silly city

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stop-motion animation pattern

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handlettering Self-directed Sketchbook

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image harvest

The first project I did the first semester, is full of trials and errors, I was clueless about how to harvest ideas from my old work and how should our final work turn out to be. I did a few sketches on editorial topic, a children’s book idea, several scattered comic ideas and during which I found my taste for absurd funny stories.

ideas sketch for image harvest

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Some 6 panel comics like snow comes in a gross way and the irritating changing checkout lines got more positive feedbacks, but I feel these few ideas weren’t enough both in quantity and quality to make a coherent collection, and I am not sure if I am able to come up with many ideas for comics that are interesting enough to present a consistent theme.

I put these aside and determined to chanllenge myself with something else ------ doing graphic novel, which I had never tried before.

And it turns out to be, very challenging for me.

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My previous work has a focus on social issue topics. The topic of Shidu came to my mind ----- a phenomenon denoting the loss of a parent’s only child in China.

“As a result of the one-child policy, there have been at least one million families who lost their only child since the implementation of the one-child policy to the end of 2010. In a society where parents rely on their children for looking after them in old age, this phenomenon may have devastating effects to many shidu parents. Many shidu parents suffer from psychological problems and financial difficulties after losing their only child.”------ from Wikipedia

I want to make a story about shidu parents and let more people pay attention to this vulnerable community. So I come up with a story where an orphan steal from a mother who lost her only son, but sympathies for each other make them start to open their hearts. I wrote a long script for the story and struggled to make the story not fall into cliché. It turns out that creating a good story is harder than I thought, especially when I haven’t write a story before and I don’t really know many stories of marginalized people. As I build it purely based on my imagination, the story still lost some credibility in its fictional narrative though I tried to make it seem real.

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first version of storyboard

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After individual meeting with Kim, I decided to make it a one-page comic as an introduction to the full story. I illustrated the panels with two contrasting color to suggest the light/dark, tense/grieve, while the outcome piece turned out to be imbalanced in color, and confusing in some parts. This piece need to a re-do.

I redrew the piece with a limited color palette, adding more panels to make the story clearer, and I also took the advice of adding some Onomatopoeia to suggest movements. The final piece turned out to be much more satisfying.

Through the process I learnt there’s a long way ahead to develop a good story and turn it into a graphic novel thus it is not something I would develop later. I put a lot of hard work into this piece, I see this project of an oppotunity to practice my storytelling ability.

final piece on Fall Show 6

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paper engineering / papercut

The paper engineering workshop led by Colette Fu is really eye-opening and I was dying to try this new way to make something. I came up with an idea of making a pop-up book collecting small interesting scenes in life. As I sketched, I felt it started to fall into creating scenes for pop-up techniques. I tried hard to figure out how pop-up work but ended with a bunch of failures. The experiment didn’t bring me improvement conceptually or techiniquely. So I stopped and started to work on papercut.

Annie Howe’s paper cut workshop inspired me to do nature-themed layered paper cut that I have always wanted to do. I chose a fall color palette and not sure if I should just using a series of yellow with diffrent hues and saturation . Eventually I settled down with five layers of strong contrasting colors to bring more depth and visual dynamics. It took me intensive hard work to complete this piece and I was quite satisfied with how it looks, but it also made me want to stop doing such things that requires more labor and techiniques than creative ideas.

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Rhino / Lasercut

I didn’t expect that lasercut workshop is actually a lot of fun.

I had learnt product design before thus using Rhino to draw a 2D line work and then put them into lasercut software is not hard for me. After testing out a few pieces I designed, I was not satisfied with what I had, I wanted to push further.

Then I had the idea of doing a stop-motion animation using lasercut masonite and drawings.

Inspired by Kōji Yamamura’s 2D hand-drawing animation A Child’s Metaphysics, I designed a story about a boy blow out his eyes, nose, mouth, brows, ears into a balloon and becomes a ballon-head boy, playing and bouncing around. Finally he gets poked by a injection needle ----- one of the most horrible thing in children’s minds.

I designed several sizes of heads, different gestures of arms, legs and bodies in Rhino and then printed them out. I shot the animation using a stop-motion animation app in phone, it took a lot of time and patience to adjust the positions of body parts to make nuanced changes, and I suddenly realized why laser-cut masonite might not be a good material to do stop-motion.

I finished the piece without the sound effect due to a limited amount of time.

Still, there’s a lot of space to improve on pacing and story plot.

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Letterpress

We had a letterpress workshop led by Baltimore Print Studios, it’s a very interesting experience. I did an elaborate line art work of a photo, some details got lost during the process of transforming my hand-drawing linework into vector image in order to make a polymer plate, which reminds me of the importance of keeping things simple when using printing methods like this.

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Publishing / matchbox book cover design

In the publishing workshop, we were asked to design a book cover for the book we chose on a match box scale, the interior of the box should also be considered into design.

I chose one of my favourite chinese comtemporary writer Xiaobo Wang’s book One Maverck Pig. The synopsis: The book “one maverick pig” is an essay written by Xiaobo Wang, while the article “one maverick pig” features a story happened during Down To The Countryside Movement of Chinese Cultural Revolution. As far as the author concerns, “they would have known completely how to live had there been no human to manage their life. They would have strolled about at their will, drinking when thirsty and eating when hungry; and when spring came, they would have talked about love. “ However, human set every pig a theme of their life. Their life was miserable, the theme was to grow meat or mating and breeding. All their life was modeled and programmed in detail. Just like millions of youth’s life then.

Pig is deemed as a docile animal. However, there will still be a maverick one fight against the absurd settings, uncompromising to the regulation at a risk of losing ones life. The pig who gets rid of the common fates pigs have has become a symbol of fighting against repression and pursing freedom.

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I did a few sketches, the idea is to show how the misfiting pig rebellious and fearless from his peers, featuring the keyword I chose to embody the thoughts of the novel ------ freedom, if there is any other, uncompromise, fight.

It might be a cliche, but I still choose the barbed wire to represent the depressing rules exerted on people or the absurd political enviroment.

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As for the word “maverick�, I tried different ways: a pig head with human eyes, pig composed of geometric shapes or organic lines, pig made of negative shapes.

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However, I still felt none of these images are strong enough, so I did the layout of titles and simplified the elements. The version of white background with blue mountains got feedbacks of “This looks like Fuji mountain in Japanese Ukiyoe.”

After critique, I decided to give it a red background because the centain political period the book critisized on has always been called a “red period” in China and I made texts the protagonist.

I designed the inside as a simplified pigsty with one pig missing, the key word “freedom” is written on the spot where the maverick pig escaped from.

“ “I’m already forty years old. So far, but for this pig, I’ve never met anyone who dared to turn a blind eye to the rules imposed upon their life.

On the contrary, I’ve only met people who try to set rules for other people’s lives, or who live contently with the rules imposed upon them.

For this reason, I never stop commemorating this maverick pig.”

One Maverick Pig

Xiaobo Wang Xiaobo Wang

“ “I’m already forty years old. So far, but for this pig, I’ve never met anyone who dared to turn a blind eye to the rules imposed upon their life.

On the contrary, I’ve only met people who try to set rules for other people’s lives, or who live contently with the rules imposed upon them.

For this reason, I never stop commemorating this maverick pig.”

One Maverick Pig

Xiaobo Wang Xiaobo Wang

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sewing / embroidery

I was left completely clueless what to do and how to do for sewing/embroidery workshop since I was techiniquely bad at it and not interested in this new medium.

I designed a vector image for the reaction piece but when things started to fall into the tedious techinique labor, a voice in my head told me to stop it (This time it is the good voice). The subject of feminism came to me naturally as I was making a zine on chinese feminism history in drawing non-fiction class.

I remembered the cultural differences I had experienced, in China, people feel more shame of talking about vagina while here seems more vagina friendly.

Using the word vagina or talking about it is still a taboo. Vagina is even being stigmatized as something dirty, filthy, unlucky. Girls never talk about it as if it never exists, as if it is a weird existence that is unworthy of notice. Girls will be critisized for sitting with their legs spread, while boys never get critisized for that.

So I imagined this image of a women sitting with her legs spread, her serious face and uninhibited posture of laying back chanllenge the viewer to think about women’s body gesture controled by the existing social convention. Her exposed armpit, breasts and vagina are juxtaposed with stars, clouds and the sun, rays coming out of her vagina are juxtaposed with sun rays, where I made an analogy between vagina and the sun. Vagina is the source of life and joy just like the sun, and the way the vagina brings life is bloody, touching and beautiful in some ways just like how sunset or sunrise strike our feelings.

By expressing the topic in a poetic way by combing women body and natural sea scene together, the piece meant to bring thoughts to the viewer, talking about vagina is a very natural thing since it is a body part that is as beautiful as nature and worths our attention.

Talking about this piece in crique wasn’t clear at first as I was trying to blend too many concepts at the same time. But thinking about how to talk about my concepts helps me clear my thoughts, I felt the urge of doing more research.

This project helps me find my deeper interest in feminst topics and feminst art study, which I did not expect.

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sewing reaction piece 28

Art Market

For art market, I came up with a bunch of ideas that will employ laser cut techiques. A diamond-shape lamp frame, a hot balloon shape lamp frame, a pair of antler earrings, a coaster and a mini landscape necklace. At last, I decided to make a pleated dress shape lamp frame, but the mock up turns out to be very unsatisfying both in function and aesthetic.

Inspired by the papercut I did, I decided to make a candle holder.

I drew the detailed nature inspired images in Rhino first, there are four image based on the season sequence, each scene with an animal and plants. Then I bought a lot of masonite to experiment putting these pieces together. It’s not easy to figure out the right width, if the width is a little too big, the piece looks rough; too small, material breaks easily. More often, the material isn’t even, sometimes even crooked, which makes some part of the cutting piece very delicate. Even the design is perfect, tenon and the nortise are often hard to fit due to the material loss during cutting. They can’t be loose or too tight.

After wasting tons of materials and a lot of errors, including paint all of 25 pieces with 3 cans of white paint and find that they can’t fit together, I was desperate as the deadline was approaching by hours. I remade another 2 more batches in the Dfab lab and many of the pieces still didn’t fit well despite I revised the original file to the most precise version. Without giving hope, I used the sand paper to polish, it took almost a whole night, and finally the products are ready to sell.

The sales is pretty positive, and I learned a lot from designing, making to packaging and selling a product throughout the process.

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Size: 4’’5’’5”, 1/8’’ thick Material: masonite & plywood, basswood This lasercut candle holder is full of detailed nature inspired imagery, it will bring warm light to your happy home. This charming nature scene is designed by artist Yifan Wu and assembled by hand. Recommend for used as electric candle holder. * Include a piece of elegant handmade paper * Electric candles sell separately * The piece is delicate, please treat with carefulness

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Typography

I didn’t approach this project by doing layout, inspired

by Glen Baxter’s witty wacky illustrations, I decided to combline images and texts together to create a letter alphabet. The secend A and C got most feedbacks, playing with texts is fun.

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A

is for attachment It is not narcissim, it is attachment between me and myself.

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A is for athletic

I’m an athletic person with my eyeball exercise 20 hours a day.

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is for communication “communication” is rare while “cominumcation” is common.

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P is for plan

Plans are tyres ------ they are only ďŹ ne when I don’t use them.

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Silly City

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Almost everyone hates this project. There wasn’t a clear standard on how the educational booklet should turn out to be, and I was confused about how much content should be covered. At first my idea is doing a ABC flashcards to demonstrate the achitectural vocubulary, but as I put myself in the position of students who might learn architecture for the first time, instead of learning the voculary from images of scattered architecture part and have trouble finding the counterparts in real life, I wish I could learn all the vocabulary on one thorough image and know where these parts are on a real building.

Inspired by Ugo Gattoni’s BICYCLE, I decided to make a 72’’*12’’ big accordion booklet with a belly belt of architecture timeline wrapped around. Spread out is a big cityscape drawing gathering different types of architecture in the city, city hall, hospital, church, library, school, museum, post office, shops, houses.

Without marking them, I designed to let the students to decide. All the architectural terms are written on flags or boards with little figures holding them. For the teacher’s booklet, I designed the layout with a simple and clear hierachy.

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Stop-motion animation

Collaboration with Gabriella on stop-motion animation is very smooth. As we both have interests in Greek mythologies, we chose the story of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, get embarassed and furious when a hunter named Actaeon, stumbles upon the scene of her bathing nude in a spring with nymphs. Actaeon is transformed into a deer and his own hounds track him down and kill him, failing to recognize their master.

Sand drawing is easy to change forms and can create a magical mood while it takes forever to make the scene close to what we want. We only shot 200 more photos by the end of the day. I played a little trick in Adobe Premiere by duplicating and transforming the photos and extending, repeating the clips, so that the video looks fulfilled. My partner found the right music for the anime, and I managed to make every main change in footages match with the music in pace.

The critique helps me find details I didn’t even realize, like the animation combined both our distinctive personal drawing styles in a very harmonious way.

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pattern

I completed the pattern design of the first piece on my GTI class with students, First I only thought about doing a pattern about cat and the things cat loves playing with. I did some research, playing with the scale and layout of diffrent objects, cat toy, bird cage, bird, plants, fish, window, balletshoes, food can, pine nut... Before I designed the second one and third one, I got really interesting idea from critique ------- developing a narrative between patterns.

The three patterns of one theme depicts how a cat ruins a home and gets punished, I tried different mock-ups, including put the intense one on a high fashion white dress, people told me it doesn’t suit well, and I realize that it is really important to know that not all design can be applied with pattern, otherwise they will already have patterns on them; it is also importamt to know who is the target audience and make research about the customer prefrences.

At last, I revised the lay out of the first one and apply the second pattern to a bag.

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handlettering

This is one of the most interesting projects I’ve done. In class, Whitney let us choose one descriptive word to do handlettering for a letter. The first word I got is “wrong-handed”, I played with the concept and I wrote the sentence with my left hand. Then I got the word “dangerous”, I got the idea of a person sticking his head into a monster’s mouth, a guy hanging on the telegraphy pole... it turned out to be very amusing; then I got ”frivolous”, I depicted an image of one man bowed touching his penis, though it was thought to be not every accurately depicting the meaning of the word, it turned out to be amusing for many too.

For the reaction piece, I made a handlettering alphebet of 26 dangerous things, yet they remained to be whimsical and quirky.

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Self-directed

My self-directed project stumbled through several stages. At first, I planned to make sex-education book for young children, but I find it really hard to come up with an interesting yet educational story; then I came up with two bird stories, the first one is about the unconfident accepting herself (the feedbacks are that there isn’t many actual “things” happening in the story but what I want to tell seems too much and too complex); the second one is about a bird overcomes acrophobia with help from his friends (the feedbacks is that story is OK, but I should really think about what I really love to draw).

Then I tried to listen to my inner voice, I know I always have a taste for quirky, funny stories with a sense of whimsical/dark humor. My favourite illustrators are more or less sharing a sense of humor or sarcastic thinking, the most inspiring ones are outspoken, even provocative.

I decided to use this project as an oppotunity to test the water, to see how far I can push my idea in topics I have always wanted to draw but never tried.

In the end, it’s a 12 pages zine on relationships, sex and solitude. Many pieces are open to different interpretations and still own many possibilities in exploration of style.

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storyboard sketch for the first bird story

storyboard sketch for the second bird story 77

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some exploration on style

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Sketchbook

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idea b

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book

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BAD IDEA BOOK Yifan Wu